First Lady Michelle Obama has always been an inspiration to me. She has many excellent attributes, but caring and intelligent are two that stand out for me. I look forward to seeing her in the White House for the next 4 years.

I wonder if Myth Robme knows about teevee, film, recorders, dvrs, intertubes, cameras, etc., like no one will hear and see his him actually make comments after they were made? I bet he will say he never made those comments about those cookies, or the media is out to get him by taking his comments out of context. Keep talking Myth….

Good Morning Chips and TOD family. Miss pat, I will go downstairs and make a batch of my special extra strength Ex-Lax portion that will send Mitten running , flipping , and flopping him on the you know what for days.
Give us time to clean our brains from all of his lies. Baking starting now. They really are delicious. HZ

Pamela, you don’t even have to be running for president, you just have to be a normal person. First thing he does is ask a woman at the table if she made the cookies, instead of, did anyone here make these? Then he ends up insulting a local bakery. He sounds like an awkward adult trying to talk to a three-year old without any idea in the world of how children think and react. Only in this case, “children” means any other human being on the planet.

His years at Bain represent everything you hate about capitalism
By Pete Kotz Wednesday, Apr 18 2012

It was the early 1990s, and the 750 men and women at Georgetown Steel were pumping out wire rods at peak performance. They had an abiding trust in management’s ability to run a smart company. That allegiance was rewarded with fat profit-sharing checks. In the basement-wage economy of Georgetown, South Carolina, Sanderson and his co-workers were blue-collar aristocracy.

“We were doing very good,” says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. “The plant was making money, and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well.”

What he didn’t know was that it was about to end. Hundreds of miles to the north, in Boston, a future presidential candidate was sizing up Georgetown’s books.

Thanks for the link, 57. LOVE Andy Borowitz.
BTW, during the initial Miss Ann/Hillary Rosen kerfluffle, I responded to you with a snide remark and I want you to know I felt guilty and ashamed ever since. Please accept my heartfelt apology.

Late yesterday President Obama’s threatened congressional Republicans with a pre-election government shutdown if they don’t get back into line with the deficit agreement established last year. There was nothing vague about the threat, either, as reported by TPM’s Brian Beutler:

“Until the House of Representatives indicates that it will abide by last summer’s agreement, the President will not be able to sign any appropriations bills,” writes Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, in a letter addressed to congressional appropriators Wednesday.

The message is simple: The government will shut down just ahead of the 2012 presidential election if Republicans break faith with the debt limit deal.

The debt limit deal requires Congress by law to limit discretionary spending in next year’s appropriations to $1.047 trillion. During the debt limit fight, leaders of both parties and the White House understood that the government would be funded at this level for the next fiscal year — and moreover they had reached accord on how that money would be divided between defense and non-defense programs. Those agreements removed two trip wires, and appeared to greatly reduce the likelihood of a government shutdown in 2012.

The GOP backtracking on the deficit deal is universally attributed to the conditions House conservatives placed on support for the Paul Ryan budget. In essence, they wouldn’t vote for it unless the leadership agreed to begin implementing its cuts through the appropriations process this year. Since this course of action also satisfied Republican Members frantic to head off the planned “sequestration” of defense spending at the end of the year, it wound up making sense to Boehner and company. And their rationalization for tearing up the agreement made so very publicly with the Senate and the White House is that the domestic spending levels in the agreement is a “ceiling, not a floor.” In other words: We never meant it.

Our job will be to tie the government shutdown to the Repugs and their lying. People who renege on an agreement in any walk of life can’t be trusted. The R’s have shown time and again that no one should ever believe a word they say and that includes their presidential candidate. I hope the president goes on television in prime time and tells everyone in American what the consequences of a government shutdown will be and why it’s happening. Let the whole thing blow up in their faces.

A few weeks ago, the House GOP was up in arms over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) $25,000 donation to anti-incumbent candidate Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who ultimately defeated his opponent, incumbent Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL). But the story got a little more fraught when it turned out that Manzullo once said Cantor would not be “saved” because he is Jewish.

Today, Cantor, the only Jewish House Republican, nearly affirmed that this was the reason he fought against Manzullo’s re-election, insinuating that anti-Semitism — and racism — are lingering problems among the House GOP generally. He speaking at a breakfast event organized by Politico.

Calling it the “darker side,” Cantor responded to Politico’s Mike Allen’s question of whether there is anti-semitism in Congress by trying to avoid commenting. But eventually he let up: “I think that all of us know that in this country, we’ve not always gotten it right in terms of racial matters, religious matters, whatever. We continue to strive to provide equal treatment to everybody.”

“We’re talking about the House Republican Caucus, not America,” Allen pushed.

Cantor then sat in silence, grimmacing for several seconds before Allen changed the topic.

I want one example from Cantor of any time in his whole rotten career when he strived to provide equal treatment to everyone. Women will be surprised by this, as will HIspanics, AAs, poor people and those with major illnesses. In his whole career he has demonstrated loyalty to only one constituency–big business. He’s a mean, nasty, soulless piece of work.

Our First Lady, Michelle Obama is just wonderful. We could not have a more deserving couple in the WH than these two people. They have the values that america brags about but we seldom see in a family, yet we hear people say some of the most vile things about them. They have their priorities straight and they are role models to be proud of for the american people and the world.

So we are reaching what is clearly a moment of truth for Obama’s Iran policy. So far, I’d argue, it has all the ingredients of success, has been a real diplomatic feather in the cap for the administration and, if it reaches a serious deal, will represent a real coup for Obama abroad. He will have ended torture, finished the war in Iraq, destroyed al Qaeda, killed bin Laden and resolved the Iran question. An Iran deal would also show how exactly Obama’s long game can work, if given time.

As I was driving to work today (and therefore obviously not paying enough attention to the road) I was thinking about the whole concept of all the segments of society that the Republican Party is at war with and has total disdain for. Last night, Chips was kind enough to post soemthing of mine that basically added children to the list along side women.

And I remembered how whent he War on Women was at the forefront (not that it has gone away) someone suggested that the letters in WAR stand for Women Against Republicans. And I started thinking of other acronyms that we can use. What follows is my list, feel free to add on as I know I missed several:

WAR Women Against Republicans (And the R can also stand for Romney in this and all cases)
CAR Children Against Republicans.
TAR Teachers Against Republicans
EAR Environment Against Republicans
LAR Latinos Against Republicans
AAAR African Americans Against Republicans
SAR Seniors Against Republicans
IMAR Intelligent Men Against Republicans
DAR Dogs Against Republicans

However, to be fair, I am sure there is a classification for people against Democrats. I call them

BLESSINGS ALL…IT’S ERRAND DAY…WILL CATCH UP LATER…INDEED…WE ARE BLESSED WITH A WONDERFUL FIRST COUPLE IN THE WHITE HOUSE…AMERICA NEEDS TO LEARN TO RESPECT AND APPRECIATE THEM. THEY HAVE SACRIFICED FOR US…BEING PRESIDENT IS NOT A PERK!

I just got a chance to watch President Obama in Michigan yesterday. That speech was amazing. It told a story. It was positive and uplifting. I loved it when PBO was ticking off his accomplishments. The cheering for capturing OBL was off the charts. I guess the crowd didn’t get the message that according the the GOP it was really the previous administration that made that possible. Seriously, it have been so entertaining to listen to the GOP downplaying and minimizing the OBL story. President Obama made them look like amateurs. It must be driving them crazy. I can just imagine what they would be saying if the roles were reversed. GWB on Mount Rushmore comes to mind.

ROMNEY OFFENDED BY PBO SAYING HE WASN’T BORN WITH A SILVER SPOON IN HIS MOUTH

OMG, I can’t stop laughing at this one. There is an endless supply of poutrage coming from the Romney campaign on absolute nonsense. Poor widdle Mitt Romney is apparently very sensitive about his wealth. This is very thin skinned and touchy for someone who thinks they are qualified to be the leader of the free world. (smdh)

—————-

* Obama told voters in Ohio yesterday, “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” Though the president has been using this line since 2009, Romney took offense, and told Fox News this morning that the president “likes to attack fellow Americans.”

What a horse’s rear this man is. He’s called PBO every name in the book and when the president makes a reference to himself, not specifically to Romney, he gets offended and makes a grossly unfair, ugly insult that demonstrates exactly how much of a lying weasel he is. The president could not have been referring to Robme in his remarks because Willard birth spoon was platinum, not silver.

During the primary campaign, Romney pledged to veto the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants who attend college; promoted the ugly notion of “self-deportation,” a radical right strategy that aims to purge America of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country; and praised Arizona’s anti-immigration laws as a “model for the nation.” Romney also trumpeted the endorsements of an array of anti-immigrant standard-bearers, from Kris Kobach to Lamar Smith to Jan Brewer to Pete Wilson.

However, Romney clearly believes that Latino voters either weren’t paying attention or will believe him when he makes his “conversion” to a more moderate stance on immigration. As NBC News reported on this weekend’s Florida fundraiser, “Predicting that immigration would become a much larger issue in the fall campaign, Romney told his audience, ‘We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,’ warning that recent polling showing Hispanics breaking in huge percentages for President Obama ‘spells doom for us.’

The National Rifle Association has pulled the video of Ted Nugent’s incendiary comments from the organization’s official YouTube account and from the NRANews.com website.

In recent days Nugent, an NRA board member, has come under intense criticism for comments at this year’s NRA convention.

Nugent described the Obama administration as a “vile, evil America-hating administration” that is “wiping its ass with the Constitution” while telling the crowd that “[w]e need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.” Nugent also claimed that “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

The Secret Service reportedly has a meeting planned with Nugent to discuss his comments.

I don’t give a damn what anybody who chooses to defend this lunatic says! Free speech my ass! I’m sick and F—king tired of people making excuses for these vile and violent comments toward our President and getting away with it! They need to be dealt with quickly and in no uncertain terms. Mr. Tough Guy PEDOPHILE Nugent needs to have his ass thrown in prison for making terrorist threats…right in the middle of general population!

April 19, 2012, 12:06 AM
Focus, People!
By CHARLES M. BLOW
The general election is off to an inauspicious start.

We are already lost in the weeds of the inconsequential.

Like kittens chasing a spot of light on the floor, the public and the press are jumping about with excitement and outrage over ancillary issues. Even there we are doing so by creating false equivalencies.

For instance, an Obama supporter, Hilary Rosen, made an unfortunate remark about Ann Romney’s being a stay-at-home mom, and the president quickly distanced himself even though Rosen apologized.

On the other hand, one of Mitt Romney’s supporters, the inflammatory Ted Nugent, made despicable and threatening comments about the president’s re-election, and Romney only soft-pedaled away from him, even though Nugent never apologized.

This is what we’re discussing — a manufactured mommy war and a rhetorical warmonger.

And while we’re distracted, recent polling suggests that the race is tightening.

This all makes me want to grab every American by the shoulder and say, “Focus, people!”

This will be a long election fought with hundreds of millions of dollars over relatively few voters in the middle. There is unlikely to be a knockout punch or a trump-card issue. There will be many ups and downs, faux pas and faux issues. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what really matters — what this and every presidential election is really about.

It is about the size and function of government in our lives — whether we value social safety nets or social Darwinism.

It is about how the government collects and spends money and whether those activities are ruled by a spirit of fairness or disproportionately favor the most well off.
It is about whether rhetoric criticizing the size and influence of government ends where individuals’ bodies begin. Whether you believe, as I do, that all liberty begins with personal liberty. That none of us has the right to impose our beliefs and values on others. That each of our bodies is sovereign, to be governed as we so choose, without the interference of government, so long as our individual choices don’t impede or encumber the liberty of others.

This is about each of us being able to love, and marry, whomever we chose.

This is about women having unfettered and unfiltered access to a full range of reproductive options, which is most fundamentally about the physical and economic well-being of both them and their families.

This is about how we prioritize and provide direction and incentives for our educational system so that we produce citizens who are well equipped to compete in a tightening global job market.

When you consider the gravity of the real issues, the minor ones drift away like the seeds of a dandelion.
This is about the judges the winner of the election would nominate, particularly to the Supreme Court, and how those nominations might balance or further skew the justice system.

This is about war philosophies: how easily a president is willing to commit troops to war, how he might execute a war once it commences and how willing he is to end it.

It is also about whether we will deal humanely with people who are in this country illegally, many of whom have been here for decades, many of whom work and are otherwise law abiding, many of whom have been raised and educated here.

When you consider the gravity of the real issues, the minor ones drift away like the seeds of a dandelion.

Neither candidate is perfect on every point, but they are not equal. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the Democrats and Republicans, have radically divergent views about the direction of the country. One is progressive; the other is regressive.

Romney and the Republicans are running a campaign of opposition and retrenchment. They want to repeal, restrict, restructure, reclaim and restore. They want to take the country back to a reality that exists only in their imaginations — and to a world that will never exist again — and freeze us there.

Mr. Blow should be directing his complain to his peers in the MSM. It is the MSM’s refusal to call out Mitt on his constant lying. It is the MSM that manufactured the Rosen “controversy” and it is the MSM and corrupt pollers who change filters to produce poll results more favorable to Mitt. We need some brave souls in our media to stand up and speak truth to power. Mr. Blow pretending that it is the public that is to blame for the garbage it is force fed by the MSM is insulting to say the least.

Thank you EricFive. I totally get the point that Charles Blow is making. But the first thing that came to my mind was to tell him that before he shakes the shoulders of the American people he might want to start with his colleagues in the mainstream media. The media firewall has been a challenge for the administration from jumpstreet. And yes we are clearly dealing with some serious WILLFUL IGNORANCE on the part of many Republicans and dare I say it the racists in the country. They don’t want to know the facts about President Obama’s accomplishments because then it might be harder for them to hate him just because he is black. I often wonder how different things would be if President Obama looked like Scott Brown.

Anyway, In the face of a feckless and lazy media, the White House Communications Department has their work cut out for them. They are making brilliant use of every piece of social media available. The whitehouse.gov website is a wealth of information for anyone who wants to take the time to poke around in there. I have watched the website get better and better over time. If you went back and looked at the condition of whitehouse.gov when President GW Bush left you would be astonished.

The problem is the media. They have abdicated their responsibility of educating and informing the public with the facts. Instead, they carry water for the GOP. They are obsessed with the horse race and ratings. They pretend both sides do it as cover. They seem to have some aversion to calling a lie a lie. If the msm lived up to the first principle of their profession which is to tell the truth, we would all benefit. Focus, Media!

“I often wonder how different things would be if President Obama looked like Scott Brown.” That is a very thought provoking question Ladyhawke. The pure hatred PBO faces is stronger and deeper than the usual partisan politics we are accustomed to. The GOP is willing to destroy this country as punishment for electing a Black man President of the United States, IMO. You are correct, PBO has had to battle the MSM’s media filter (i.e. present every story in a way that will damage PBO, give GOP lies greater weight than the truth, etc.) since day one of his administration (actual pior to day one because the MSM/GOP tried to blame stuff on PBO that happened PRIOR to him taking the oath of office). It is a testament to PBO’s political skill (and the fact that more and more citizens are tuning ou the MSM) that he is as popular as he is, considering the concerted MSM/GOP attack he has faced throughout his presidency.

In 2008, Barack Obama captured two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, winning in crucial swing states with large Hispanic populations like Colorado, Nevada and Florida.

The president’s re-election campaign is attempting to replicate that success for 2012, targeting those same states with this week’s launch of its first set of Spanish-language television and radio ads.

In four separate ads, Latino campaign organizers recount personal stories as reasons for supporting the president, focusing on education.

In one ad, Obama volunteer Lynette Acosta explains the importance of a college degree to her and her family: “Without the help of loans, I would not have been able to study,” Acosta says in the ad. “That’s why everything the president has done to increase access to funding is so important. … My mother says, ‘The best gift you could give me is a diploma that I can hang on the living room wall.’ ”

PBO has just announced his plan to award Pat Summit the highest civilian medal of honor. She is the winningest college basketball coach in her 38 years as the Tennessee woman’s basketball coach. She is holding a press conference today stating her plans now to step down after her diagnosis of early onset dementia of the Alzheimer strain.

It is absolutely wonderful for our President to honor Pat Summitt! Ms. Summitt is one of my heroes. The winningest basketball coach male or female and such a wonderful mentor and role model not for the young women she coached, but for all of the people she touched over the years. She changed lives. When she disclosed her diagnosis, true to form, she said there would be no pity party, but I have to force back tears now that she’s inevitably had to step down. God Bless You, Pat…and thank you President Obama.

Obviously, this is heart wrenching for me. Yet, in true Pat Summit style, she did what she felt was best for the team and the university. She is one class act. Trust me, she is THE best ambassador for our state. Thank you, PO, for awarding her this special honor.

Regarding the cookie debacle of Romney’s…..didn’t his mother teach him to say “Thank you.” when food is offered? You don’t offer a judgment, you smile and say thank you. Whether you eat or not is incidental. He has NO social sense or graces whatsoever! I don’t care how much money he has, he knows nothing about being polite and a good guest. My mother would have scolded him significantly, and I would have done the same to my children. My daughter-in-law would never let her young children behave like that! I cannot believe his lack of upbringing! As we know, money does not buy class. (I do believe George and Lenore would be appalled)